


Know Better

by thepartyresponsible



Series: Give Me Mercy [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Mob, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Exes, Hook-Up, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 21:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18157055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepartyresponsible/pseuds/thepartyresponsible
Summary: The meeting’s barely over before Clint’s on his way out. He needs to leave, badly. He needs to be in any room but this one. As he moves toward the door, he sees Nat push to her feet, sidestepping behind him to block pursuit, and then, a half second later, there’s Barney’s fake-friendly voice, sing-songing out, “Where’re you going, Grayson?”Clint’s out the door and up the stairs and halfway home before he shakes it off. Fourteen years on, and Dick Grayson can still tug all the air out of a room just by smiling at him. It’s a hell of a trick. Clint wishes he’d never learned it. Or, at the very least, he wishes Dick would stop using it.





	Know Better

                The meeting’s barely over before Clint’s on his way out. He needs to leave, badly. He needs to be in any room but this one. As he moves toward the door, he sees Nat push to her feet, sidestepping behind him to block pursuit, and then, a half second later, there’s Barney’s fake-friendly voice, sing-songing out, “Where’re you going, Grayson?”

                Clint’s out the door and up the stairs and halfway home before he shakes it off. Fourteen years on, and Dick Grayson can still tug all the air out of a room just by smiling at him. It’s a hell of a trick. Clint wishes he’d never learned it. Or, at the very least, he wishes Dick would stop _using_ it.

                No one stops him when he gets to the apartment building. He wonders who warned them. Maybe they just know his patterns by now. When he comes home late, dressed like he’s been at a funeral, he doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t have anything good to say to anybody.

                There’s a post-it note stuck to his door when he gets there. Clara from upstairs, letting him know she walked Lucky half an hour ago. He needs to tell her to stop leaving notes on his door; they could be used to make a timeline.

                If he asks her, she’ll slide them under the door instead. He’s just gotta be careful how he asks. He knows he scares her sometimes.

                She’s a sweet kid. From Iowa, just like him. Here for school. She wants to be an artist. He put her in the unit above him so he could hear her footsteps. She’s up and moving by nine every morning, home by ten most evenings.

                He’s not trying to be a creep. He just likes to know she's alright. She’s a couple inches over five feet tall, can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and she’s got no family in the area. He worries about her. Especially now. Especially since Grayson fucked everything up. 

                It means he wears the hearing aids more than he used to. But what does he care? Stark got him a new pair, and these fit so well he hardly notices them at all.

                Used to be, most of Bed-Stuy was safe enough. These days, he’s just proud that no one from his building has gone missing. At least the damn tracksuits are still scared enough of him for that.

                “Hey,” he says, when he opens his door and Lucky jumps all over him. “Hey, down, c’mon.”

                He curls his fingers in Lucky’s fur, rubs his ears, lets Lucky shove his nose into Clint’s face and snuffle around. He’s a good dog. Clint still can’t believe anybody would look at him and want to hurt him, but he’s been watching people hurt good things for no reason his entire life.

                He rattles around the apartment for a couple minutes, aimless and distracted. His feet won’t stick to the floor long enough to hold still. He feeds Lucky even though he’s pretty sure Clara’s been sneaking him treats, and he kicks some laundry around like he’s actually going to get anything done tonight. He’s thinking about dinner when he catches sight of some dried blood stuck under one of his fingernails, left over from the skeevy piece of shit Jason took apart, and then he just grabs a beer from the fridge instead.

                It’s a porter, so it’s almost a meal. He’ll have a couple more, make up for the missing calories.

                Well, his mother’s dead. Who’s gonna check up on him?

                There’s a second, when he’s taking his hearing aids out, that he thinks he should probably lock his living room window. He takes a long sip from his beer and stares at the window in question and then, with a roll of his eyes, he drops his hearing aids onto his bedside table, grabs the beer, and takes off for the shower.

                He stays in the shower until the beer’s gone and the blood’s washed down the drain. He feels better, afterward. Calmer, anyway. Not sleepy yet but like he’ll be able to sleep at some point in the next couple hours, maybe.

                He dries himself off, wraps a towel around his waist, and opens the bathroom door.

                Lucky doesn’t come bounding up to gambol around his ankles, which is how he knows there’s someone else in the apartment. He’s still for a second, thinking it over, and then, because he’s twenty-eight years old, because he’s a Goddamn adult, he doesn’t go back into the bathroom to wait this whole thing out.

                He grabs the handgun from behind the TV and steps quietly through his apartment, careful about sightlines. He’s not sure if he’s relieved or pissed when he leans just far enough around the corner to catch sight of Dick Grayson, sitting on the edge of his bed, petting his dog.

                Mostly, he just feels tired.

                He stares at Dick for a moment. He’s tipped forward, fingers buried in Lucky’s fur, and Clint knows he hasn’t snuck up on him, but that’s what this feels like. It feels like a hit. Like Clint’s going to shoot him execution-style in the back of the head, leave his blood haloed out on the floor.

                He wonders if that’s what it’s gonna be like for Dick in the end.

                Even Barney would hesitate to put money either way on that one. The odds run too close to even.

                Clint gives himself a single second to pray to whatever gods might live in Stark’s head that, if it comes to that, he’ll send Nat or Bucky or, hell, even Steve. He hopes with every spare inch of himself that Stark won’t be thoughtless enough to send him.

                “Hey, Dick,” he says.

                Dick looks back at him over his shoulder. He’s fucking beautiful, the way he always is. Like it’s an afterthought or an accident. Like he just wakes up every morning with that tousled hair and tanned skin and full, sensitive mouth that always wants to curl into a smile.

                God, Clint doesn’t know how he forgets this, every time. Maybe it’s for the best that he does, but he’d like to build up some kind of resistance to it.

                What he’d like most of all is to not be standing here in a Goddamn towel while Dick Grayson sits on his bed in a perfectly tailored suit.

                “Hey, Clint,” Dick says. And Clint’s always going to know the shape his name makes on Grayson’s mouth, but the next bit isn’t as clear. Well, it’s hard to read lips when you’re busy staring at someone’s mouth for the wrong reasons.

                “Hold on,” Clint says. He steps around Dick and over Lucky and gets to his bedside table. He ditches the gun and scoops up his hearing aids up, fusses with them for longer than he needs to, tries to buy himself some time. “What?” he asks, turning back to Dick.

                “Tried knocking,” Dick says, with an easy, half-apologetic smile. “You didn’t answer.”

                “Yeah, most people take that as a ‘no.’” Clint turns his back on Dick, heads for his closet.

                “You want me to go?” Dick asks.

                Clint doesn’t look back. “Oh, I get a say now?”

                Which is shitty. Which is cruel, on some level. If Clint didn’t want him here, he would’ve locked his fucking window. It’s not the same thing as an invitation, but, for the two of them, an unlocked window is practically permission.

                Jesus, Nat’s going to smack him right across the back of the head for letting Dick Grayson into his place again.

                “I’ll go if you want,” Dick says. He doesn’t sound sad, which is considerate of him. “I just wanted to check on you. Sounded like things have been rough in your neighborhood recently.”

                Clint doesn’t laugh at him. God knows Dick Grayson never means any of the harm he causes.

                He grabs clothes out of his closet and changes, pulls on his underwear and sweats and a t-shirt. He makes himself be deliberate about it, not rushed. He lets Dick get an eyeful of all the new scars he’s picked up since the last time Dick saw him like this.

                It’s better than telling Dick to his face that the Family Shelter’s a Goddamn ghost town, that most of the homeless kids Clint used to see around are dead or worse, that Murdock’s been jumped twice already and the tracksuits have started following Clint around like hopeful vultures.

                “I’m fine, Dick,” he says. He double-knots the tie on his stupid sweatpants like he thinks he’s making some kind of point. Like he wouldn’t cut the damn things off of himself in a heartbeat if it seemed like maybe Dick was interested in getting into them. “Does Wayne know you’re here?”

                Dick doesn’t say anything, and so, eventually, Clint has to look up at him.

                He’s got that same worried expression he always used to get, right before he tried to do something pointless and so fucking sweet that it could cut the legs right out from under Clint.

                Dick’s always trying to make things better, make _people_ better. Clint wishes like hell that any part of the world had ever lived up to Dick’s expectations. He wishes _he_ had.

                “I didn’t thank you,” Dick says.

                Like _that’s_ what this is about. Like there’s any Goddamn reason Dick Grayson would need to thank him for anything.

                “I meant to,” Dick says. “I was gonna—I don’t know. Call, text. Come by.”

                He runs a hand up into his hair. Clint catches the glint in the light, sees the scars laid out like spiderwebs across Dick’s knuckles.

                The last time Dick was in this bed, his hands were such a fucking mess that Clint had to wrap them in every bit of gauze he had. Looks like they’re better now. Looks like they’re healing fine.

                There’s no reason at all for Clint to touch them, feel the raised scar tissue against his lips, but he wants to anyway.

                “I fucked it up,” Dick says. It sounds like a confession. He’s still smiling a little, but there’s regret in his eyes. An old, aching pain that Clint never could help him patch, no matter how hard he tried. “All of it. God. All I had to do was—I just had to _stay away_. I was _out_. I just had to---”

                “Stop it,” Clint says.

                He’s never been any good with words. He’s made his peace with that, mostly. He doesn’t need them. Stark sure as hell doesn’t pay him for his words, even if Rogers is starting to see some value in them. But it’s frustrating, always, the way he can never quite seem to find the right thing to say to Dick.

                Not anymore, anyway. There was a bright, beautiful stretch of years where they understood each other perfectly. Or at least Clint thought they did. And he believed that right up until the moment when he thought Dick was finally working his way up to saying _I love you_ and it turned out, instead, he’d been trying for months to say _Goodbye_.

                He watches the line of Dick’s throat as he swallows. He watches the way his hands don’t quite shake as his fingers curl into Clint’s sheets.

                “I fucked it up,” he says again, quiet and careful. Resigned.

                The bitch of it all is that it’s true. Twelve months ago, the Joker kidnapped Tim Drake to make some kind of point, and, while Bruce Wayne was still working out the diplomatic details of raiding a warehouse in New York to get him back, Dick Grayson drove up from Bludhaven and beat the Joker’s head against a concrete floor until every piece left was small enough to be power-washed down the drain.

                Dick beat him with a crowbar until it got too wet with blood to hold and then he finished it with his hands and the heavy tread of his boots.

                Dick Grayson, who never so much as carried drugs for anyone. Dick, who fought every year to keep himself separate from Wayne’s business, who held that line even when it broke them apart, who fucked off out of Gotham and New York the morning after his graduation from Hudson, who left all of them behind so he could be a _police officer_ of all the Goddamn things in the world.

                Dick Grayson, who came back from Bludhaven the night after Coulson was murdered. Who cleaned Clint’s gun for him, patched his cuts, poured him whiskey, and tipped him into bed. Who _cried_ about it, silent and still, holding Clint close in the middle of the night and crying over what Clint lost when Clint himself didn’t feel a fucking thing about it for another twenty-four hours.

                Dick Grayson, who worked for years to break free from all this bullshit and then traded it away in a single blood-splattered evening.

                He’s been working for Bruce ever since. You can’t kill a man like the Joker without people noticing. And there were plenty of people who would’ve ripped Dick apart just for the fun of it, if Bruce hadn’t intervened.

                Working for Bruce has got to be better than prison. But maybe, to Dick, it feels like the same thing.

                “Lots of people fucked this up,” Clint says, instead of anything else.

                Dick closes his eyes. Clint tracks the slow, controlled expansion of his chest as he breathes in. “I just didn’t--” he says and then stops, waves a hand. “I didn’t want what happened to Jason to happen to Tim.”

                God, the _mess_ of that.

                Clint remembers when Jason went missing. Wandered off from Bruce in a temper tantrum and got himself dragged right into the hell he’d barely managed to sidestep when he was younger.

                That’s the problem, Clint thinks. That’s the _problem_ with Gotham. Everyone in New York knows who they are. But people in Gotham have a bad habit of thinking they can be something else.

                But maybe that’s not fair. Standing here, looking at Dick Grayson sitting on his bed, Clint wishes like hell that he was someone else, too.

                “I know,” Clint says. “You think I blame you? I never blamed you for that.”

                Clint never liked the Joker. He was a mad dog, however useful. He was always getting his teeth into people, and it never mattered much, because he never picked people with enough power to push back. But he’d been losing respect for limits. He’d been playing games with stakes none of them could afford. Jason was a warning shot they all should’ve heeded. By the time he took Drake, it was years past when they should’ve put him down.

                But killing the Joker cracked open the East Coast. However crooked his brain was, the Joker had always hated Hydra and loved Bruce Wayne. Without him, trouble brewed up in Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and Boston, and it spread, made inroads, bubbled up in Hell’s Kitchen and Bed-Stuy and the Narrows.

                The peace between Stark, Wayne, and the Joker had barely passed for functional. But all of them, except maybe Wayne, had underestimated how much worse it would be with the Joker dead.

                Over in Hell’s Kitchen, Matt Murdock’s losing territory, losing people. Someone took a shot at Foggy Nelson two days ago, and they haven’t put anyone in the ground for it, and Clint can _feel_ it. All that chaos, damn near a living thing, hatching out of the Joker’s tomb like spiders spilling out of eggs.

                “Anyway,” Dick says, hands still curled too tight into Clint’s sheets, shoulders pulled into a tense line. “I just wanted to say thanks. I was a mess. You cleaned me up. You didn’t have to.”

                Clint found Dick first. Of course he did. Before anyone else thought to look, Clint went hunting, and he found Dick Grayson in a Goddamn splatter-painted nightmare of blood, crimson all down his front, wet to the elbows, crunching broken teeth and skull fragments under his boots.

                Dick didn’t hear him when he yelled, and he didn’t notice when he got close, and, when Clint put his hands on Dick’s arms, he figured he had 50/50 odds of getting himself thrown right down there next to the headless mess of the Joker’s body and treated just the same.

                He’d grabbed him anyway. Well, he was always going to be some kind of idiot for Dick Grayson. 

                But Dick hadn’t hurt him. Hadn’t hit him once. He’d crumbled apart in front of him, all that rage gone in a blink, and Clint had taken him home to clean him up because he couldn’t stomach the thought of anyone else seeing Dick Grayson with blood on his hands and tears down his face.

                “Yeah, I did,” Clint says. “I had to. You came back home after Coulson, remember?”

                Although New York isn’t Dick’s home. And that’s not what Clint means anyway. He says _back home_ and he means _back to me_ , and that’s the problem. That’s always the problem. He wants Dick so much that he feels rootless without him, like he doesn’t belong anywhere in the whole Goddamn world.

                Dick smiles at him, sideways and knowing and almost sad. “That why you did it? You thought you owed me?”

                Christ. Of course it isn’t. The truth is, he’d do any damn thing he could to keep Dick safe. He let him walk away, didn’t he? He shut his mouth and bit his lip, and he let Dick walk out of his apartment and out of his life and out of this whole fucked-up mess.

                He’s tired, suddenly. He’s tired all the time, but this is an old, bone-deep _ache_ of exhaustion. He settles on the bed next to Dick, feels like his legs won’t hold him for another five seconds. He breathes out, puts his elbows on his knees, stares at his bare feet next to Dick’s pristine thousand-dollar shoes.

                When he looks over, Dick’s watching him close and careful, and his eyes slip, just for a second, down to Clint’s mouth.

                “You know why I did it,” Clint says. Because there’s not a chance in hell Dick doesn’t know Clint loves him. Everyone knows Clint Barton’s been in love with Dick Grayson since they were both fourteen years old.

                Dick stares at Clint for a long moment. He swallows. Clint watches his throat work, tries to convince himself to stop staring at the bare skin of Dick’s neck.

                _It’s only going to hurt_ , he tells himself, a little nonsensically, kinda desperate. _You know it always just hurts in the end._

                “You were the hardest thing about leaving,” Dick tells him. “I almost— I thought I couldn’t do it. Thought I couldn’t leave you.”

                “But you did.”

                But he did. And he had to. And it had hurt like losing something vital, like having a lung ripped right out of him, but Clint had known, even when it hurt, that it was the best way things could have ended. Dick Grayson wasn’t ever supposed to live a life like this. Dick was too good for Clint, too good for Bruce Wayne, too good for Gotham.

                He’d been happy, when he could be anything other than miserable, that Dick had made it out.

                “But I did,” Dick says. He smiles. It’s terrible. It’s exactly like looking at something dead. “And look how that worked out.”

                “Hey,” Clint says. He puts a hand on Dick’s shoulder, but he won’t look up, won’t look at him, so Clint’s hand somehow ends up in Dick’s hair, curled protectively around the back of Dick’s neck. “Hey,” he says, again, because it’s all he has. It’s all there is in his head, except for all the things he can’t say, all the landmines that’ll shred him apart if he puts any pressure on them at all.

                Dick makes a soft noise in the back of his throat, something small and wounded, and he tries to cover it a half-second later with a strained, hysterical laugh. It sounds like something the Joker taught him, maybe while he was bleeding out.

                “I should go,” Dick says. And that sounds like Bruce Wayne, gritted teeth and good business sense. Sounds nothing at all like the Dick Grayson who stood in Clint’s apartment and told him he was out, that he was leaving, that he wasn’t ever coming back to this _bullshit life, Clint, this fucking **trap**_.

                He hadn’t asked Clint to go with him. There wasn’t any room in that life raft for two. Bruce Wayne may have loved his ward enough to let him leave, but Clint was nothing to nobody important, and he’d owed debts he still hasn’t paid off.

                “Yeah,” Clint says. “You should go.”

                And then, because he’s an idiot, because he’s hopeless, because Natasha’s right when she tells him there’s no fixing stupid, he kisses him.

                There’s a moment where everything hangs, suspended, and Clint feels like he’s tipping over the edge of a very long fall. And then Dick’s making a hungry noise into Clint’s mouth, head tipping, hand curling around Clint’s thigh, and Clint doesn’t feel anything but desperate and burning and starved.

                “What do you want?” Dick asks, a minute or maybe an hour later, when his stupid shoes have been thrown across the room and his expensive suit is a puddled mess on the floor. “What do you want?” he asks again, mouth wet against the skin of Clint’s collarbone, hands _everywhere_.

                _I want you to stay_. The thought drops like a lightning strike, shattering the haze of how much he wants this. Mean as a suckerpunch, cruel like a knife in the back. _I want you to stay._

                “You,” he says, because he can’t lie to Dick Grayson, but he’s learned how to live on half-truths. “Christ, Dick, I just want you.”

                Dick pulls back to stare at him, and, for a second, he looks wrecked in a different direction, distant and tired and _sad_. And then he blinks and it’s gone, and he’s grinning when he pushes Clint until his back hits the sheets. “You’ve got me,” he says, like it’s nothing. Like he doesn’t matter much, so he’s easy to give away. “Always have, right?”

                There are all sorts of reasons this is a bad idea. It’s always been a bad idea, the two of them.

                Clint lets it happen anyway. _Always have, right?_

 

\- - -

 

                In the morning, Dick’s dressed in yesterday’s clothes, looks like someone’s misplaced investment banker while he eats two bowls of rainbow-colored children’s cereal and drinks half a pot of black coffee. He’s sitting at Clint’s wobbly kitchen table, drinking out of the only mug Clint owns that’s not from a city Natasha killed someone in, and Clint’s swigging the rest of the coffee right out of the pot while he watches Dick from across the room.

                Dick’s cellphone is on the table in front of him, and he’s been scrolling through his text messages for at least the past sixty seconds.

                “Gotta go?” Clint asks, because sunup was two hours ago, and it’s time to stop acting like they’ve time-traveled back to six years ago, when they got to do things like this. When lazy mornings weren’t a liability, and they were still young enough that these kind of mistakes could be forgiven.

                “Don’t think Tim can stall him much longer,” Dick says, with a shrug and a sideways smile. When he looks up, his eyes are soft, but Clint knows what guilt looks like on Dick’s face; he spent years studying it.

                “Okay,” Clint says. He downs the rest of the coffee. It’s hot and there’s too much of it, but it gives him something to focus on that isn’t the stupid, hopeless twist of pain in the pit of his stomach. “Well.” He shrugs. “I’ll see you around, Dick.”

                Dick’s face freezes. For a second, the string they tied between themselves when they were young stretches so tight Clint thinks it’s gonna rip his heart right out of his chest. And then Dick nods, mouth curling up into something self-deprecating and bittersweet and resigned.

                “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess you will.”

**Author's Note:**

> Like the other fics in this series, the title is taken from "It Will Come Back" by Hozier, although, honestly, this one's vague enough to be from anywhere.
> 
> For fic updates and more unusual AUs, follow me on [tumblr](https://thepartyresponsible.tumblr.com/).


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